Yes, I've read the published study. It's full of odd claims. For instance, it claims that at Kanner's initial study in the 1940s, autism rates were much lower than they are now - when it's commonly accepted that itw as simply not diagnosed at that time due to the fact that it was an (as-yet) untreatable form of retardation that was just as debilitating as any other, and thus was unnamed rather than unoccurring - this continued to be true for a long time.
Furthermore, it dismisses the twin experiments (and others) that, on the basis of substantial study, have as yet failed to find much of a causal link between developmental environment and incidence of occurrence.
It assumes, essentially, that "autism develops by the time a child is three years old". This is misstating the truth: that autism typically manifests by three years old. It is not known when it develops, but many people think it develops prenatally. The evidence (http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/10/16/autism.genes.reut/index.html) for it being genetic in nature (no, this does not disinclude the possibility of an environmental trigger) is far stronger. The behavioral differences between an autistic and nonautistic child could barely be noticed much before 2 anyway, because they're so heavily linked to their social function, and because the specific behaviors simply don't exist in children younger than that, so there is no basis for comparison.
If you read the study, you'll see that they basically pick something that grew rapidly in the 1980s and then assume that since television watching grew, and children that ended up autistic tended to behave differently in front of televisions (duh), that since the Amish (a genetically relatively nondiverse population) have low rates of autism, it must be because they don't watch television. They then introduce a correlation between weather conditions and autism rates, and subsequently admit that weather conditions may not actually affect total television watched. They never once mention, despite a number of mentions of whether pollution or other environmental factors might affect autism rates, that precipitation level itself might be a conveyor of some factor - think acid rain. This is just one of the myriad other conclusions they could have pursued, but didn't.
Then, in their finest hour, they mention "television exposure for [a previous study's] youngest age group is negatively related to the education level of the parents..." - without ever once mentioning the well-documented correlation with highly educated/intelligent parents.
So yes, it seems to me that they picked one factor out of a great many that rose during the 1980s (why not correlate it with rising crack use? That may go up when it rains, or be more particularly measurable in California, and it sure went up in the 1980s...) and ran with it because it seems to make a modicum of sense. They don't really go much further than demonstrating some correlation, and the amount of noise that they ignore far outweighs that which they included, in my admittedly-nonexpert opinion.
no subject
Furthermore, it dismisses the twin experiments (and others) that, on the basis of substantial study, have as yet failed to find much of a causal link between developmental environment and incidence of occurrence.
It assumes, essentially, that "autism develops by the time a child is three years old". This is misstating the truth: that autism typically manifests by three years old. It is not known when it develops, but many people think it develops prenatally. The evidence (http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/10/16/autism.genes.reut/index.html) for it being genetic in nature (no, this does not disinclude the possibility of an environmental trigger) is far stronger. The behavioral differences between an autistic and nonautistic child could barely be noticed much before 2 anyway, because they're so heavily linked to their social function, and because the specific behaviors simply don't exist in children younger than that, so there is no basis for comparison.
If you read the study, you'll see that they basically pick something that grew rapidly in the 1980s and then assume that since television watching grew, and children that ended up autistic tended to behave differently in front of televisions (duh), that since the Amish (a genetically relatively nondiverse population) have low rates of autism, it must be because they don't watch television. They then introduce a correlation between weather conditions and autism rates, and subsequently admit that weather conditions may not actually affect total television watched. They never once mention, despite a number of mentions of whether pollution or other environmental factors might affect autism rates, that precipitation level itself might be a conveyor of some factor - think acid rain. This is just one of the myriad other conclusions they could have pursued, but didn't.
Then, in their finest hour, they mention "television exposure for [a previous study's] youngest age group is negatively related to the education level of the parents..." - without ever once mentioning the well-documented correlation with highly educated/intelligent parents.
So yes, it seems to me that they picked one factor out of a great many that rose during the 1980s (why not correlate it with rising crack use? That may go up when it rains, or be more particularly measurable in California, and it sure went up in the 1980s...) and ran with it because it seems to make a modicum of sense. They don't really go much further than demonstrating some correlation, and the amount of noise that they ignore far outweighs that which they included, in my admittedly-nonexpert opinion.